For this years festival we have had the goal to make toilets at our venues wheelchair accessible. We have embraced last years critique, asked for “expert” advice and made work to improve this situation – with some success…
The good news!
The HC toilet at Blitz will have arm-bars installed and users will find it clean with sanitary wipes, soap and toilet paper available. The toilet itself is otherwise built by HCWC norm with enough turning space for a wheelchair.
The bad news…
We have not managed to create a wheelchair accessible toilet situation at Anarres book café.
To solve the issue of the Anarres toilets simply being to small for it to be accessible, we came up with the idea to rent a portable festival toilet that was and to place it on the parking lot right outside (and pimp it up and make it real cute). Not the perfect solution, but a solution.
After being sent back and forth in the labyrinth Oslo City bureaucracy our application was finally declined with the reason that we had to run it through a “approved firm that makes street signs” that would also make the correct street signs. We got this news this week , only a few days before the festival, this despite making several phone-calls beforehand applying to make sure we went about this the right way. But now it was to late to restart the process in time for the festival.
We will not give give up the work to improve the accessibility at the Reclaim Pride festival, meanwhile we apologize for our shortcomings.